Gaza civil defence says 15 killed in Israeli strikes

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 15 people on Saturday across the Palestinian territory, where Israel has ramped up its military offensive in recent days.

Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a pre-dawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of the southern city of Khan Yunis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he said.

At Khan Yunis’s Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered around white-shrouded bodies outside.

“Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians -- my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun.

“We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?”

The Israeli military said it was unable to comment on individual strikes without their “precise geographical coordinates”.

In a statement, the military said that over the past day the air force had struck more than 100 targets across the territory, including members of “terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, military structures, underground routes and additional terrorist infrastructure”. Israel resumed operations in Gaza on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire.

Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday that at least 3,747 people had been killed in the territory since then, taking the war’s overall toll to 53,901, mostly civilians.

Limited aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip restarted on Monday for the first time since March 2, amid mounting condemnation of the Israeli blockade.